"Listen earnestly to anything your children want to tell you, no matter what. If you
don't listen eagerly to the little stuff when they are little, they won't tell you the big
stuff when they are big, because to them all of it has always been big stuff."

"Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what
amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar
bent of the genius of each."

"Children raised with love and compassion will be free to use their time as adults
in meaningful and creative ways, rather than expressing their childhood hurts in ways that
harm themselves or others. If adults have no need to deal with the past, they can live fully
in the present."

"Growth and mastery come only to those who vigorously self-direct. Initiating,
creating, doing, reflecting, freely associating, enjoying privacy - these are precisely what
the structures of schooling are set up to prevent, on one pretext or another."

"According to Ferber, the trouble with letting a child who fears sleeping alone into
your bed is that 'you are not really solving the problem. There must be a reason why he is
so fearful.' Yes, there must. Here's one candidate. Maybe your child's brain was designed by
natural selection over millions of years during which mothers slept with their babies. Maybe
back then if babies found themselves completely alone at night it often meant something
horrific had happened - the mother had been eaten by a beast, say. Maybe the young brain is
designed to respond to this situation by screaming frantically so that any relatives within
earshot will discover the child. Maybe, in short, the reason that kids left alone sound
terrified is that kids left alone naturally get terrified. Just a theory."

"Of all the virtues required in the art of child-rearing, none is more important - and
none rarer - than patience, in parents, in family, in friends; patience to allow the miracle
of human development to unfold according to its own internal laws."

"We learn because we want to learn, because it's important to us, because it's
natural, and because it's impossible to live in the world and not learn. Then along comes
school to mess up a beautiful thing."